Local newspapers in Mississippi, South Carolina, Kentucky, and West Virginia failed to show the connection between restrictive 20 week abortion bans currently being debated in their states' legislatures and a model bill by Americans United for Life (AUL) -- an anti-choice group dedicated to ending access to abortion in the United States.

Dozens of voter ID laws have been introduced in state legislatures over the past two years, including particularly strict measures passed in seven states in 2011 -- Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Wisconsin. There is widespread evidence that this surge of voter ID laws stems from model legislation crafted in 2009 by a conservative group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). But a Media Matters analysis has found that the largest newspapers in the seven states that enacted voter ID laws in 2011 have largely ignored ALEC's influence. Indeed, of the newspapers examined, only Rhode Island's Providence Journal mentioned any connection between the state's voter ID bill and ALEC.